The street was unpaved, and thick with oozing, blue-black mud. It was littered with empty bottles, dead dogs, broken chairbacks, and garbage. On the front verandas of the buildings opposite, idle Jamaicans watched the slow, slippery progress of the Virginia’s small cavalcade with glazed indifference. The population of Aspinwall was almost all black, and almost all poverty-stricken. They were the remnants of the Caribbean work force that the founders of the Panama Railroad Company had brought over, along with Chinese and Irish, to lay the tracks across the isthmus; and now they rotted, along with the town in which they lived, in a swampish miasma of disease, heat, and hopelessness. All that the founders had left behind of themselves was a red-granite memorial, streaked with rain, which was dedicated to the vision and fortitude of John Lloyd Stephens, Henry Chauncey, and William Henry Aspinwall.

Collis took a long look at the memorial as he rode past it. Then he raised his eyes upward, above the wet red rooftops, where huge black buzzards wheeled tirelessly around and around and around, as if the town itself were a corpse from which they could pick; and the rain fell as if it were going to fall for ever.

Chapter Four

It was still raining during the night as Collis lay in the Hotel Colón trying to sleep. He tossed around in his narrow iron-framed bed, tousled and sweating, and at last he sat up with the crumbly old mosquito netting draped around his head as if he were a new bride, or a man playing the ghost of himself. The heat seemed to be even worse at night, but he had heard that the night air carried fever, and so he had kept his shutters closed. He lifted the netting, groped to find his matches on the bedside table, and awkwardly lit his oil lamp. The yellowish light swelled to fill the room.

The Hotel Colón, when they had arrived, had turned out to possess a decaying French grandeur, with half-collapsed chandeliers and muddied carpets, although the rooms themselves were bare-boarded and rudimentary. Collis wouldn’t have minded if they had been strewn with rushes. He had been so exhausted by the time a young pockmarked Spanish boy had shown him up to his balconied room on the second floor that he had closed the door and fallen back on his bed with a greater feeling of relief and luxury than he had ever been afforded by the St Nicholas Hotel or the Union Club or even one of the plushest bawdy houses on Mercer Street. After lying motionless for five minutes, he had kicked off his wet boots, stripped off his rain-darkened coat, and then lain back again and closed his eyes.